Two years ago she won a SAG Award, Critics’ Choice Television Award, and Golden Globe for playing Joyce Mitchell in the Showtime miniseries Escape at Dannemora and last year she picked up the Golden Globe and Primetime Emmy Award as Supporting Actress for her role as Dee Dee Blanchard in the Hulu anthology series The Act.
Neither character could be described as sympathetic, but Arquette inhabits them with a veracity and commitment that makes for compelling viewing. Her Dannemora character is a distinctly unglamorous prison worker who has affairs with two inmates while aiding their plans to escape. Benicio Del Toro and Paul Dano, who play the prisoners, are both formidable actors but Arquette is more than their match. She realises Mitchell as middle aged, frumpy, but possessed of a voracious sexual appetite and is well aware of the anomaly. During promotion for the series she said, “You’re more likely to see a unicorn than a middle-aged woman who does not have a kind of Playboy bunny body being sexual in a movie. There were a lot of people before I did Escape at Dannemora who said: ‘Oh my God, don’t gain weight for that. Don’t let them make you look like that or you won’t be able to get jobs.’ I was like: ‘I’m an actor, just let me act! I don’t feel that we put that on males and I don’t want to carry it around anymore.”
She went a step further for her role in The Act, piling on weight and wearing prosthetic teeth and brown contact lenses to become Dee Dee Blanchard, a mother suffering from Münchausen syndrome by proxy, who faked her daughter’s serious ailments, confining her to a wheelchair and subjecting her to unnecessary procedures and medications for more than 20 years.
“I don’t want to be the ingenue forever,” Arquette said. “We see people my age still trying to be ingenues, and at a certain point, you look otherworldly. How are you going to play a 50-year-old woman in the real world?”
The fact is, she has played it real in every role from Alabama in True Romance to Ed Wood’s girlfriend Kathy O’Hara and even David Lynch’s cult psychological thriller Lost Highway in dual roles as Renee Madison and Alice Wakefield, an elusive femme fatale.
But it was her much acclaimed role as the mother in Boyhood that cemented her reputation as an actress. Richard Linklater’s sprawling depiction of a boy from ages 8 – 18. His life was filmed over twelve years from 2002 to 2014. Arquette plays Olivia Evans, a single mother who raises her two children mostly alone with the erratic help of their father, played by Ethan Hawke. The movie attracted universal praise, with many critics calling it a “landmark film”, with Arquette in particular receiving widespread acclaim for her performance which is complex, nuanced and vanity free as she ages and gains wisdom over the 12 years.
Katie McDonahugh, writing for Salon, said “the role gave [Arquette] space to be all of these messy things at once, and her performance was a raw, gutsy meditation on those profoundly human contradictions.” Margaret Pomeranz called Arquette’s performance “stunning.”
Arquette scooped the board of Awards, winning the Academy, BAFTA, Critics’ Choice, Golden Globe, Independent Spirit, and SAG Awards for Best Supporting Actress.
At a press conference for Boyhood, Hawke turned to Arquette and said, “I’m just throwing props your way. I’m surprised that people don’t write more how awesome it is to see Patricia’s character be in this movie and to see a real woman who is a mother and a lover and more than one thing in a movie. I feel so proud to be a part of a movie that respects her character the way this movie does, and I feel it’s also sometimes so real and so true that you almost don’t ever see this in film. It’s true in life. We see it all the time, but I don’t see that woman in movies.”
And it is probably this quality of being a strong, present and complex female that marks Arquette out. After the film’s release she found herself once more being interviewed about the portrayal of women on film. She said to People magazine, “I’ve had so many of these conversations in my life, what I look like on film, what I don’t look like on film. What are we supposed to look like? Not that I don’t love being a woman, not that I don’t love the differences between men and women. I just mean, as an actor – why is this a conversation? Why is aging a conversation? It’s a one-sided conversation because it’s only ever had by women.”
One physical attribute that she says was scrutinised at a young age were her teeth. She’s been quoted as telling her parents she didn’t want braces or her teeth straightened because “it didn’t feel like it would fit who I was inside.
“I think my role models were very different,” she says now. “Celebrity culture is the Kardashians. For me, it was Led Zeppelin, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Deborah Harry – what I considered cool were women who were not playing that game where looks were the be all and end all.”
Arquette was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1968 to an actor father and therapist mother. Her siblings, Rosanna, Richmond, Alexis, and David, all became actors.
For a time, her family lived on a commune in rural Bentonville, Virginia. She has said they became poorer the longer they lived there, and she believes that experience enlarged her empathy. Their father was an alcoholic, and their mother violently abusive. As a teenager, she left home to live with her sister, Rosanna in Los Angeles.
She says Rosanna’s success in films such as Desperately Seeking Susan helped her. “I don’t know if I could have broken in so easily had my sister not been a star. I had the opportunity to have more auditions. Then they were: ‘Oh, you’re totally different to your sister’.”
Apart from her films and recent series success, Arquette became a household name playing psychic detective Allison DuBois in the supernatural drama series Medium (2005 – 2011). Once again it was her unique grasp of character and ability to convey complexity and presence that earned her critical praise. She won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series in 2005, from two nominations she received for the role, in addition to three Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild Award nominations.
In 2015 she picked up another nuanced detective role for two seasons playing Avery Ryan in CSI: Cyber.
Outside acting, Arquette has a reputation as a political activist, partly fuelled by the 2015 Boyhood Oscars acceptance speech when she gave a big shout out to gender pay disparity in the industry. She told Time magazine, “This is a huge discrimination issue affecting women across America. It affects whole lives. I wasn’t talking about my own position. I know I’ve been really blessed in my life. What I was talking about is the other 52 percent, and how it doesn’t make sense why they’re being discriminated against because of their gender.”
She has also spoken on the #MeToo debate, especially as her sister Rosanna was among the first to speak out about Harvey Weinstein.
“People like my sister, who was really brave and came forward, started these conversations and again, there was a backlash, because they were actresses, spoiled, blah blah blah… But it started such conversations.”
Arquette says that #MeToo painfully surfaced a lot of incidents she’d buried in her mind, ranging from inappropriate to horrifying, but suggests she was “really lucky” on that front. “I had powerful boyfriends who people wanted to work with, and I don’t think people wanted to cross them.” [Her second partner was Nicolas Cage] “I think I got a lot less of that than other people did.”After her two intense award winning roles, her most recent project was Netflix’s Otherhood (2019), a comedy about mothers and sons directed by Cindy Chupack, also starring Angela Bassett. “I play a normal mom and I really needed that.”
She voiced a character in Toy Story 4 and has a role in a TV socio drama Severance, now in pre-production, and is also working on her memoir. One thing is certain, she will continue to challenge and surprise us in her 50s and beyond. She told Backstage magazine, “Part of why I feel so grateful for acting is because of how it’s allowed me to expand as a human being and as an artist. I’ll always be limited by my own capacity, but acting is not limited.”
And to a Vanity Fair Reporter she comments, “Sometimes actors get bummed out, but if you don’t really detach your self-esteem from if you do or don’t get a part, or if you do or don’t get a good review, this business will drive you insane. Luckily, I don’t have that personality trait. You really have to have some sense of yourself and your own value as a human being that no one else can take away.”
